Samsung's latest solid-state drive (SSD) is smaller than a US postage stamp, and weighs about the same.

The new SSD, which goes by the catchy PM971-NVMe moniker, is "the industry's first NVMe PCIe solid state drive in a single ball grid array package," Samsung says. Its tiny size (20mm by 16mm by 1.5mm and 1 gram) means it will fit nicely in next-generation PCs and ultra-slim notebook PCs.

The device "triples the performance of a typical SATA [Serial AT Attachment] SSD," Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president of Samsung's Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering team, said in a statement. "The introduction of this small-scale SSD will help global PC companies to make timely launches of slimmer, more stylish computing devices, while offering consumers a more satisfactory computing environment."

Boasting read and write speeds up to 1,500 megabytes per second and 900MB/s, respectively, the PM971-NVMe can transfer a 5GB, full HD movie in about three seconds, or download it in about six.

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Add to that random read and write IOPS (input output operations per second) of up to 190K and 150K, respectively; a hard drive, by contrast, processes up to 120 IOPS in random reads.

The new Samsung SSD will be available globally this month in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB storage options.

Rival Seagate recently said it built the world's fastest SSD. Capable of throughput performance of 10GB/s, the device works with any system that supports the NVMe protocol, which is intended to replace the legacy SATA standards.

Stephanie began as a PCMag reporter in May 2012. She moved to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland. She interned at Baltimore magazine and graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (in the town of Indiana, in the state of Pennsylvania) with a degree in journalism and mass communications.
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